I’m European. My mother tried to get me into Christianity. When I was 7 or 8 I asked “If God created everything, then who created God?” I got no answer, ever since that moment, I didn’t want to be religious. My mother tried until I was 14. It failed.
Also, I find american Christians weird. They twist and contort Christianity into something to suit their ideological needs, racism, homophobia, capitalism, nationalism, unilateralism, etc.
And don’t forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that “without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?”
Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.
People who ask that question are really telling on themselves; they’re saying that without religion they would have no qualms stealing, murdering, and raping. They’re very dangerous people.
Oh absolutely. That’s the scariest part about this whole line of argument.
Christians do not believe people are inherently good. We are all sinners. And even scarier, you can be excused for anything if you confess. Three Bloody Marys and one Hello Dolly and you’re golden. Still get into heaven.
The whole religion is just a thinly veiled framework designed to allow bad people to do bad things - and even make good people do bad things.
35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’
37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters,[a] you were doing it to me!’
There are many parts of Christianity, but these are among the clearest words of its founder. Wherein this admonition do you find a framework to do bad?
Want me to list all the parts of the Bible where it commands Christians to kill gays…?
But that’s not even the point. You know just as well as I do - Christians of each century have always cherry picked the Bible. There’s a currently fashionable interpretation of the same book that keeps changing over time. Pick a different country and a different century, suddenly people are burning witches.
The exact contents of the Bible don’t even matter that much, it’s the fact that Christians are free to interpret it to their liking.
The Bible isn’t the framework I was talking about. The framework is the Bible plus the man with the funny hat can tell you whatever the fuck he thinks it means and what makes you blindly serve his current agenda.
They are not all dangerous. Most are just ignorant. Sometimes willfully so. They have been conditioned to never even think about questioning the rules, so they never had that moment where they thought “wait none of this makes any sense”. We should be more compassionate towards these folks. Most of them are not bad people they are just incapable of questioning their place in the universe.
I’m not saying all religious people are dangerous, just those who ask how someone can have a moral compass without religion. In order to ask that question genuinely they have to believe that they, without their religious rules, would have no qualms with harming others for their own gain.
You also see plenty of people delegating their sense of Right and Wrong to, for example, political leaders.
A great example is people who would look at what’s going on in Gaza putting aside politics and going “yeah, knowingly killing tens of thousands of children is objectivelly a bad thing” but as soon as their favorite political leaders start opinating about it, all of the sudden they’re all “I don’t believe that’s a Genocide” (even after the UN officially deemed it a Genocide) and claiming that people criticizing Israel are anti-semites.
I’ve seen it happen in the country were I live - people who previously admitted that what was happening was bad, suddenly when their favored rightwing politicians took an interest in it and openly sided with Israel, start voicing quite different opinions which ape what those politicians are saying. You get further confirmation that they’re driven by politics when they start framing the whole thing with local politics - which has pretty much zero influence on the actions in Gaza - hence that framing means they’re looking at it through the eyes of local tribalism rather than using a personal sense of Right and Wrong.
As I see it, the problem isn’t specifically Religion or Politics, it’s people with high Tribalism (hence easilly swayed by the leaders of their tribes, such as religious or political tribes) and lacking or with a very weak moral compass.
FFS I hate that. “Religion poisons everything” no! No it doesn’t! Think if christianity wasn’t a thing they wouldn’t find something else to twist? After all it’s not like any other good thing got twisted, no? Communism, patriotism, charity, heck, even local communities?
Christianity says: Do not do to others what you don’t want done upon yourself. No matter if sinner or faithful, treat all with respect (nagging about becoming christian is ok tho, sadly). Do not fall for greed, lust or pride.
American “Christians” aren’t Christians, same like most of the local Patriots are actually Nationalists and Communism is mostly used as a another tool for simply stealing power.
I know I am pretty much shaking my fist at the sky here, sorry, but I really needed to let it out ._.
Edit: I don’t have much time - sorry - so I will say it here.
Christianity has defined core tenets - the ten commandments. If you routinely not follow them, you’re not chrisitian, you’re a blasphemer/sinner (if you considered yourself christian in the first place), case closed. So stop with the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, because at this point it’s fallacy fallacy.
Another thing - some of you all mentioned that Christianity has various differences and all that. True. And honestly good catch. If Americans didn’t break the core tenets.
And last thing, someone mentioned pedo priests. Yes, I believe they shouldn’t be considered christians and in the spirit of the faith they should, at best, be considered lost lambs. But there’s a difference between Church as in Community and Church as in Institution, and the latter one likes to shield it’s buddies, which is disgusting.
Best of all, I don’t think I am even christian. xD
Classic defense by religious apologists and still a fallacy. You don’t wish to associate all the bad Christians with Christianity, so you pull the old “they aren’t real Christians” card. No, only you, a good and righteous and kindhearted person, you are the only one who is a true Christian. Of course. We’ve heard it countless times.
Of course they’re Christians. You don’t get to whitewash Christianity by simply declaring they aren’t.
“No atheist believes in God” is a factually correct statement. It’s like saying “One does not equal two” - a verifiable, objective truth that does not rely on anyone’s opinion.
Therefore, person B made a contradictory statement, and person A would be correct in responding “Then you aren’t an atheist”, because person B stated a verifiable falsehood. Same as saying “One equals two”. We all know it’s wrong.
Christianity has a much looser definition. You quoted it yourself:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
So anyone who follows this religion and calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Nothing in the definition says “You must follow the Bible to the exact letter” in order to be one. There wouldn’t be ANY Christians if that were true.
So that leaves us with a whole bunch of people who all claim to be Christian, but have different opinions on…
how strictly you have to follow the Bible,
whether racism is condoned or forbidden by the Bible,
whether slavery is forbidden by the Bible,
who you can fuck,
what kind of funny hat you have to wear,
what food you can or can’t eat,
whether you have to kill any non-believers,
… et cetera, et cetera.
And all of these people claim the others aren’t the true believers.
Now here’s a very simple question: What gives you the confidence, why should we believe you that it’s YOU, out of all these people, who follows the correct interpretation of the Bible?
That’s why the No True Scotsman fallacy applies to the whole bunch, including you, when you claim the others are no true Christians. Not a single Christian can objectively, verifiably prove that their individual view of Christianity is the correct one.
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
And that is not an objective statement that’s verifiably and objectively true. It DOES depend on personal opinion and interpretation.
Other Christians might say other stuff in the Bible is more important. Like killing homosexuals. Or burning witches.
There is no clear definition of an ideal Christian. Never was. Never will be. Every century has its own view on what Christianity has to be like, we just happen to live in one which tends to agree with your views.
In other words, according to your statement, there were almost no Christians a few centuries ago, which is verifiably untrue.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
To be a Christian someone just needs to identify as a Christian. They don’t actually have to do anything specific with that self identification that aligns with the Bible or any particular denomination’s practices. That is because belief and faith and religion have a massive spectrum of beliefs and practices wrapped up into one. A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?”
“The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.”
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
And these people are people who attend religious ceremonies, not Christians.
Same as someone attending a meeting about Atheism doesn’t become an Atheist by attending the meeting but by being convinced that God doesn’t exist.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
Is that so? A lot of agnostics call themselves atheists. In general, if you ask atheists specifically about what they believe, quite a few of them actually describe agnosticism, as in they do not firmly believe that god doesn’t exist, but rather believe that there’s no basis in believing that god exists.
The difference between atheism and agnosticism has no practical meaning to the vast majority of unbelievers.
You can’t positively state that something does not exist. You can’t logically be 100% certain there is no God. We know that.
So if you love going by definitions, yes, most unbelievers are agnostics, not atheists.
So why do we keep calling ourselves atheists? Because we view the likelihood of God’s existence as so infinitesimally small, the difference between agnosticism and atheism becomes negligible. If we rate the odds of God’s existence at 0,000000001% we can as well just call it zero.
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
Yes, you do, that’s what the whole thread here was about.
And you mistake my position on belief as well. I am mostly agnostic.
And yes, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is huge, except if you are too uneducated to understand the difference, which makes it weird that you have such a strong opinion on the matter.
Knowing a name of a fallacy doesn’t mean you understood what the fallacy means.
The No true Scotsman fallacy is a very specific thing and it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Here’s the name-giving example of the No true Scotsman fallacy:
Person A states an absolute statement: “No Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
Person B disproves that by offering a counter-example “Angus is a Scotsman and he puts sugar in his porridge.”
Person A declares “But no true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge.”
So for an argument being the No true Scotsman, there need to be three elements. If one or more are missing, the fallacy doesn’t apply:
Person A does not retreat from the original statement
Person A offers a modified assertion that excludes all counter-examples by definition (this turns the argument into a tautology: “No true Scotsman puts sugar in his porridge, and a true Scotsman is a Scotsman who does not put sugar in his porridge.”
Person A uses rhetoric to signal that change
So why does the no true Scotsman fallacy not apply here?
Because it’s about this change, not about whether something can be classified as something.
Take for example this exchange:
Person A: “A true Scotsman is someone who lives in Scotland, holds a Scottish passport and identifies as a Scotsman.”
Person B: “But Angus, who was born in the USA, and holds an US passport and who’s only connection to Scotland is that his great grandma was from there claims that he is a true Scotsman.”
Person A: “He can claim what he want, he is no true Scotsman.”
In this case Person A
Did not retreat from the original statement
Did not modify the original statement
Did not use rhetoric to signal a change, because no change existed.
A true Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ.
American “Christians” claim to be Christians but are largely against the teachings of Christ.
Hence they are no true Christians.
The “no true scotsman” fallacy is about changing your argument into a non-falsifiable tautology. It’s not about using the words “true” or excluding some group from some definition. And it certainly doesn’t mean “Everyone who calls themselves X surely and irrefutably belongs to group X”.
I follow your logic, and it does make sense, but I think the problem might be that those arguing against you are American, not Scotsmen /s
Can we agree that there can be good and bad, or perhaps generous vs selfish Christians? Another issue is “Christian” is sometimes used adjectively, “that’s pretty Christian of you”, which is generally used to mean generous, but has nothing to do with someone’s belief in God, Jesus etc.
Probably a person’s belief in supernatural beings has nothing to do with their ethics, morality or generosity, it’s just that in some societies at certain times there are perceived correlations, and irrespective of whether these reflect reality or not, they, through deliberate conflation of religion, morality, politics etc. can color people’s opinions of those belonging a specific religion.
Ok, let me put it in a way that you might understand:
Person A: “You aren’t an Atheist if you believe in God.”
Person B: “But I identify as an Atheist and I believe in God.”
Person A: “Then you aren’t an Atheist.”
You: “No true Scotsman! Anyone who calls themselves an Atheist is an Atheist, no matter if they believe in God.”
Do you see how this makes no sense?
An Atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God, not a person who calls themselves an Atheist. And saying you aren’t an Atheist if you believe in God isn’t a fallacy but just purely the definition of the term.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a Christian:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
So someone who does not follow or adhere a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is not a Christian. Not by fallacy, but by definition. And it doesn’t matter what they call themselves.
“If God created everything, then who created God?”
There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.
The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”
So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).
But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”
If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.
Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.
The answer that any person who has thought about it and not rejected the idea is: If a being that has created and shaped our universe exists, it exists (at least partly) outside of our universe. Like a programmer doesn’t have to follow in his life the limitations of his code in programming, such an entity’s existence would be so far outside our modes of thinking that “who created him?” would simply fall flat as a question.
To begin to answer such a question one would have to have some knowledge of the plane of existence where the divine resides, and as that is outside the realm of what we can understand through physics and the natural world we live in, the question becomes unanswerable.
The question then becomes, can something exist on another plane of existence? The answer is of course, we can’t examine anything outside our universe, so, the answer must be, we don’t or can’t know.
I suppose then, the next question becomes, do you want to believe that there is something /someone outside the natural universe that gives meaning to our existence?
The question itself doesn’t really make sense, because it just boils down to “Why don’t we know everything?”.
The same question would lead to the same answer (“We don’t know”) if we ask it about e.g. the Big Bang. “If everything was created by the big bang, what created the big bang?”
It also applies literally in every field where we don’t know something yet (“What’s beyond the stars/beyond the universe?”, “What are quarks made of?”, “What’s past infinity?”). We don’t even know what’s in the dark at the edge of the solar system. Judging by orbits and gravitational patterns, there’s likely an entire large planet that we don’t know of because it’s too far from the sun and thus too dark.
It would be idiotic to summarily dismiss every field where there are things we don’t know, and where there are edges to our knowledge that are so far away that we cannot know or understand them.
My point is not that we don’t know yet, my point is that we can’t know. All our knowledge is based on studying the natural universe, if something is beyond it, then by definition it would not be knowable by studying our universe. Perhaps at some stage we could reach a way of examining and understanding the supernatural, but for our intents and purposes it’s outside the box, while we are inside, and our only way to relate to it is to choose whether we believe in there being something outside the box or not.
If we can examine and understand the ‘supernatural’ then it just becomes knowledge and natural, or at least our perspective of it does.
The easiest example is natural phenomenon like flooding, volcanoes, storms, fire, and tons of other things were or are seen as supernatural and had beliefs and religions built around them. Some were considered supernatural, or to have supernatural causes.
Did our understanding of them make them not supernatural or were they natural the entire time and we just didn’t understand them yet?
‘Supernatural’ is not a real thing. It is human speculation about why and how natural things happen. There are no gods as described by any belief system, just things we don’t know or understand yet.
I don’t really agree with that. A program could break out of the sandbox and get to know the things around it. In fact, there are many programs that interact with the real world, gathering information about it and acting on it.
If there was something like an actually sentient program, it would be totally conceivable that said program could use cameras, microphones and other sensors to get to know its programmer.
The difference between the science and things considered supernatural is that one is something we have a solid understanding of and the other is speculation.
If there’s an unexplained phenomenon and we find a solid explanation for it, it becomes science. Weather and other natural phenomena used to be in the realm of the supernatural, same as dragon bones, mermaid bones and the kraken. Until we found out what they really were and how they worked.
If magic were to exist in reality, it wouldn’t be magic but instead just a branch of science.
A lot of things we can do nowadays would be called magic a few centuries ago. I mean, we can literally make frogs float in thin air. We can make incredible amounts of power from some magic rocks (nuclear power). We can even inscribe magic patterns into sand to make it think and talk (computers).
So coming back to the beginning: If we talk about something like a Simulation Hypothesis scenario (which is de facto identical to a scenario where God exists outside of our plane of existence, however that is defined), it’s totally in the realm of possibility of that scenario that the simulated could break out of the simulation.
Or in case of the Big Bang Theory, it would be theoretically possible to peek before the big bang.
I’m not saying that it is actually possible, but I’m saying that we can’t summarily dismiss the possibility.
But, here’s the kicker, if we don’t know anything about this other plane of existence, then how can we know that our universe couldn’t spontaneously arise from it without the intent of a creator? That’s the crux of the question: We have a mystery about the origin of our existence, and “solving” the mystery by saying, “God did it,” is just sweeping the mystery under the rug and pretending it’s not there. What OP was able to see at 7 or 8 years old was that the mystery was still there, but with an unexplained extra step added.
Christianity (and most religions) always has been a way for people to cope with their fears and guilt. ‘what happens after we die?’ -> ‘its heaven dont worry’. ‘Am I a bad person?’ -> ‘no Jesus died for you dont worry fam’
It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.
My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.
A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.
I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.
I’m European. My mother tried to get me into Christianity. When I was 7 or 8 I asked “If God created everything, then who created God?” I got no answer, ever since that moment, I didn’t want to be religious. My mother tried until I was 14. It failed.
Also, I find american Christians weird. They twist and contort Christianity into something to suit their ideological needs, racism, homophobia, capitalism, nationalism, unilateralism, etc.
That’s not just Americans that do that… That’s pretty much anywhere with any religion.
And don’t forget, those are the people who tell us atheists that “without the Bible, where do you get your morals from?”
Well, we can see what these biblical morals are - you mentioned it: homophobia, racism etcetera. It makes people hateful, while claiming it is charity and compassion.
Religion poisons everything.
People who ask that question are really telling on themselves; they’re saying that without religion they would have no qualms stealing, murdering, and raping. They’re very dangerous people.
Oh absolutely. That’s the scariest part about this whole line of argument.
Christians do not believe people are inherently good. We are all sinners. And even scarier, you can be excused for anything if you confess. Three Bloody Marys and one Hello Dolly and you’re golden. Still get into heaven.
The whole religion is just a thinly veiled framework designed to allow bad people to do bad things - and even make good people do bad things.
35 For I was hungry, and you fed me. I was thirsty, and you gave me a drink. I was a stranger, and you invited me into your home. 36 I was naked, and you gave me clothing. I was sick, and you cared for me. I was in prison, and you visited me.’
37 “Then these righteous ones will reply, ‘Lord, when did we ever see you hungry and feed you? Or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 Or a stranger and show you hospitality? Or naked and give you clothing? 39 When did we ever see you sick or in prison and visit you?’
40 “And the King will say, ‘I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these my brothers and sisters,[a] you were doing it to me!’
There are many parts of Christianity, but these are among the clearest words of its founder. Wherein this admonition do you find a framework to do bad?
Want me to list all the parts of the Bible where it commands Christians to kill gays…?
But that’s not even the point. You know just as well as I do - Christians of each century have always cherry picked the Bible. There’s a currently fashionable interpretation of the same book that keeps changing over time. Pick a different country and a different century, suddenly people are burning witches.
The exact contents of the Bible don’t even matter that much, it’s the fact that Christians are free to interpret it to their liking.
The Bible isn’t the framework I was talking about. The framework is the Bible plus the man with the funny hat can tell you whatever the fuck he thinks it means and what makes you blindly serve his current agenda.
They are not all dangerous. Most are just ignorant. Sometimes willfully so. They have been conditioned to never even think about questioning the rules, so they never had that moment where they thought “wait none of this makes any sense”. We should be more compassionate towards these folks. Most of them are not bad people they are just incapable of questioning their place in the universe.
Ignorance is dangerous
I’m not saying all religious people are dangerous, just those who ask how someone can have a moral compass without religion. In order to ask that question genuinely they have to believe that they, without their religious rules, would have no qualms with harming others for their own gain.
I think it’s broader than that:
You also see plenty of people delegating their sense of Right and Wrong to, for example, political leaders.
A great example is people who would look at what’s going on in Gaza putting aside politics and going “yeah, knowingly killing tens of thousands of children is objectivelly a bad thing” but as soon as their favorite political leaders start opinating about it, all of the sudden they’re all “I don’t believe that’s a Genocide” (even after the UN officially deemed it a Genocide) and claiming that people criticizing Israel are anti-semites.
I’ve seen it happen in the country were I live - people who previously admitted that what was happening was bad, suddenly when their favored rightwing politicians took an interest in it and openly sided with Israel, start voicing quite different opinions which ape what those politicians are saying. You get further confirmation that they’re driven by politics when they start framing the whole thing with local politics - which has pretty much zero influence on the actions in Gaza - hence that framing means they’re looking at it through the eyes of local tribalism rather than using a personal sense of Right and Wrong.
As I see it, the problem isn’t specifically Religion or Politics, it’s people with high Tribalism (hence easilly swayed by the leaders of their tribes, such as religious or political tribes) and lacking or with a very weak moral compass.
FFS I hate that. “Religion poisons everything” no! No it doesn’t! Think if christianity wasn’t a thing they wouldn’t find something else to twist? After all it’s not like any other good thing got twisted, no? Communism, patriotism, charity, heck, even local communities?
Christianity says: Do not do to others what you don’t want done upon yourself. No matter if sinner or faithful, treat all with respect (nagging about becoming christian is ok tho, sadly). Do not fall for greed, lust or pride.
American “Christians” aren’t Christians, same like most of the local Patriots are actually Nationalists and Communism is mostly used as a another tool for simply stealing power.
I know I am pretty much shaking my fist at the sky here, sorry, but I really needed to let it out ._.
Edit: I don’t have much time - sorry - so I will say it here.
Best of all, I don’t think I am even christian. xD
I got bad news for you, Christians have been hypocrites for alot longer than the US has existed.
Classic defense by religious apologists and still a fallacy. You don’t wish to associate all the bad Christians with Christianity, so you pull the old “they aren’t real Christians” card. No, only you, a good and righteous and kindhearted person, you are the only one who is a true Christian. Of course. We’ve heard it countless times.
Of course they’re Christians. You don’t get to whitewash Christianity by simply declaring they aren’t.
Which fallacy is this? It’s not the “No true Scotsman” one as explained here: https://lemmy.world/post/37452533/19987098
For example, let’s turn that argument around:
Did person A argue fallaciously to you? Or is person B just an idiot who took on a wrong label?
“No atheist believes in God” is a factually correct statement. It’s like saying “One does not equal two” - a verifiable, objective truth that does not rely on anyone’s opinion.
Therefore, person B made a contradictory statement, and person A would be correct in responding “Then you aren’t an atheist”, because person B stated a verifiable falsehood. Same as saying “One equals two”. We all know it’s wrong.
Christianity has a much looser definition. You quoted it yourself:
A Christian (/ˈkrɪstʃən, -tiən/ ⓘ) is a person who follows or adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Abrahamic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
So anyone who follows this religion and calls himself a Christian is a Christian. Nothing in the definition says “You must follow the Bible to the exact letter” in order to be one. There wouldn’t be ANY Christians if that were true.
So that leaves us with a whole bunch of people who all claim to be Christian, but have different opinions on…
… et cetera, et cetera.
And all of these people claim the others aren’t the true believers.
Now here’s a very simple question: What gives you the confidence, why should we believe you that it’s YOU, out of all these people, who follows the correct interpretation of the Bible?
That’s why the No True Scotsman fallacy applies to the whole bunch, including you, when you claim the others are no true Christians. Not a single Christian can objectively, verifiably prove that their individual view of Christianity is the correct one.
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
And that is not an objective statement that’s verifiably and objectively true. It DOES depend on personal opinion and interpretation. Other Christians might say other stuff in the Bible is more important. Like killing homosexuals. Or burning witches.
There is no clear definition of an ideal Christian. Never was. Never will be. Every century has its own view on what Christianity has to be like, we just happen to live in one which tends to agree with your views.
In other words, according to your statement, there were almost no Christians a few centuries ago, which is verifiably untrue.
Person B is an idiot who doesn’t understand words because atheist is a simple label with a singular meaning.
To be a Christian someone just needs to identify as a Christian. They don’t actually have to do anything specific with that self identification that aligns with the Bible or any particular denomination’s practices. That is because belief and faith and religion have a massive spectrum of beliefs and practices wrapped up into one. A large number of people who attend religious ceremonies don’t even believe in the deities or take things literally, they are there for the community.
According to Christ himself, this one is pretty central:
If someone denounces this baseline (and not fails to follow it, but denounces it), there’s not much left to a claim of following Christ.
And these people are people who attend religious ceremonies, not Christians.
Same as someone attending a meeting about Atheism doesn’t become an Atheist by attending the meeting but by being convinced that God doesn’t exist.
Is that so? A lot of agnostics call themselves atheists. In general, if you ask atheists specifically about what they believe, quite a few of them actually describe agnosticism, as in they do not firmly believe that god doesn’t exist, but rather believe that there’s no basis in believing that god exists.
The difference between atheism and agnosticism has no practical meaning to the vast majority of unbelievers.
You can’t positively state that something does not exist. You can’t logically be 100% certain there is no God. We know that. So if you love going by definitions, yes, most unbelievers are agnostics, not atheists.
So why do we keep calling ourselves atheists? Because we view the likelihood of God’s existence as so infinitesimally small, the difference between agnosticism and atheism becomes negligible. If we rate the odds of God’s existence at 0,000000001% we can as well just call it zero.
In other words, stop whining about atheists not using the term you’d prefer. We don’t tell you what you should call yourself either.
Yes, you do, that’s what the whole thread here was about.
And you mistake my position on belief as well. I am mostly agnostic.
And yes, the difference between agnosticism and atheism is huge, except if you are too uneducated to understand the difference, which makes it weird that you have such a strong opinion on the matter.
No true Scotsman fallacy.
Knowing a name of a fallacy doesn’t mean you understood what the fallacy means.
The No true Scotsman fallacy is a very specific thing and it doesn’t mean what you think it does.
Here’s the name-giving example of the No true Scotsman fallacy:
So for an argument being the No true Scotsman, there need to be three elements. If one or more are missing, the fallacy doesn’t apply:
So why does the no true Scotsman fallacy not apply here?
Because it’s about this change, not about whether something can be classified as something.
Take for example this exchange:
In this case Person A
That’s what @Demdaru@lemmy.world argued:
The “no true scotsman” fallacy is about changing your argument into a non-falsifiable tautology. It’s not about using the words “true” or excluding some group from some definition. And it certainly doesn’t mean “Everyone who calls themselves X surely and irrefutably belongs to group X”.
No-True-Scotsman-Fallacy Fallacy
I follow your logic, and it does make sense, but I think the problem might be that those arguing against you are American, not Scotsmen /s
Can we agree that there can be good and bad, or perhaps generous vs selfish Christians? Another issue is “Christian” is sometimes used adjectively, “that’s pretty Christian of you”, which is generally used to mean generous, but has nothing to do with someone’s belief in God, Jesus etc.
Probably a person’s belief in supernatural beings has nothing to do with their ethics, morality or generosity, it’s just that in some societies at certain times there are perceived correlations, and irrespective of whether these reflect reality or not, they, through deliberate conflation of religion, morality, politics etc. can color people’s opinions of those belonging a specific religion.
That is what you do when you say “They aren’t real Christians because they do X.” It is the poster child of the no true Scotsman fallacy.
Unless you think it requires changing after the start of the conversation in which you are completely wrong.
Ok, let me put it in a way that you might understand:
You: “No true Scotsman! Anyone who calls themselves an Atheist is an Atheist, no matter if they believe in God.”
Do you see how this makes no sense?
An Atheist is a person who doesn’t believe in God, not a person who calls themselves an Atheist. And saying you aren’t an Atheist if you believe in God isn’t a fallacy but just purely the definition of the term.
Here’s the Wikipedia definition of a Christian:
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christians)
So someone who does not follow or adhere a religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ is not a Christian. Not by fallacy, but by definition. And it doesn’t matter what they call themselves.
What you are doing is saying they are not really Christians because they do or don’t do X and that is exactly what the fallacy is.
Are priests who molest children not real Christians?
Atheist is different because it is a singular thing, like calling that priest a child molester. He did the thing so that is what he is.
Again: “They are no true Atheists because they believe in God.”
No true scotsman or not?
People who use Communism as a tool for simply stealing power are called Bolsheviks. Not all communists are like that.
There’s a lot of places where one can poke holes into faith/the concept of a God, but I don’t think this is one.
The reason being that God’s existence doesn’t actually change anything about the question or the answer. You can rephrase it as “If everything came from the Big Bang, what came before the Big Bang and what created the preconditions of the Big Bang?”
So you could use the same argument to “disprove” literally any world view, including science, or even hypothetical scenarios like the simulation theory (“If we live in a simulation, who is running the simulation?”).
But you can not only “disprove” every potential answer to “where does everything come from”, but you can also rephrase the question to “If atoms are made of quarks, what are quarks made of, and what are their components made of?” or to “If there’s an end to the universe, what is outside of it?”
If you are smart enough though, you will see that none of that is actually disproving anything, because if you rephrase the question further it becomes “Why don’t we know everything?” and that’s a rather simple-minded question to ask. One befitting of a 7 or 8 year old, but not really of an adult.
Before the circumnavigation and the discovery and charting of all of the world, people also didn’t know what was on the other side of the planet and still it would have been dumb to doubt what we knew (e.g. that the British Isles existed) only because there were large white spots on the map elsewhere.
The answer that any person who has thought about it and not rejected the idea is: If a being that has created and shaped our universe exists, it exists (at least partly) outside of our universe. Like a programmer doesn’t have to follow in his life the limitations of his code in programming, such an entity’s existence would be so far outside our modes of thinking that “who created him?” would simply fall flat as a question.
To begin to answer such a question one would have to have some knowledge of the plane of existence where the divine resides, and as that is outside the realm of what we can understand through physics and the natural world we live in, the question becomes unanswerable.
The question then becomes, can something exist on another plane of existence? The answer is of course, we can’t examine anything outside our universe, so, the answer must be, we don’t or can’t know.
I suppose then, the next question becomes, do you want to believe that there is something /someone outside the natural universe that gives meaning to our existence?
The question itself doesn’t really make sense, because it just boils down to “Why don’t we know everything?”.
The same question would lead to the same answer (“We don’t know”) if we ask it about e.g. the Big Bang. “If everything was created by the big bang, what created the big bang?”
It also applies literally in every field where we don’t know something yet (“What’s beyond the stars/beyond the universe?”, “What are quarks made of?”, “What’s past infinity?”). We don’t even know what’s in the dark at the edge of the solar system. Judging by orbits and gravitational patterns, there’s likely an entire large planet that we don’t know of because it’s too far from the sun and thus too dark.
It would be idiotic to summarily dismiss every field where there are things we don’t know, and where there are edges to our knowledge that are so far away that we cannot know or understand them.
My point is not that we don’t know yet, my point is that we can’t know. All our knowledge is based on studying the natural universe, if something is beyond it, then by definition it would not be knowable by studying our universe. Perhaps at some stage we could reach a way of examining and understanding the supernatural, but for our intents and purposes it’s outside the box, while we are inside, and our only way to relate to it is to choose whether we believe in there being something outside the box or not.
If we can examine and understand the ‘supernatural’ then it just becomes knowledge and natural, or at least our perspective of it does.
The easiest example is natural phenomenon like flooding, volcanoes, storms, fire, and tons of other things were or are seen as supernatural and had beliefs and religions built around them. Some were considered supernatural, or to have supernatural causes.
Did our understanding of them make them not supernatural or were they natural the entire time and we just didn’t understand them yet?
‘Supernatural’ is not a real thing. It is human speculation about why and how natural things happen. There are no gods as described by any belief system, just things we don’t know or understand yet.
I don’t really agree with that. A program could break out of the sandbox and get to know the things around it. In fact, there are many programs that interact with the real world, gathering information about it and acting on it.
If there was something like an actually sentient program, it would be totally conceivable that said program could use cameras, microphones and other sensors to get to know its programmer.
The difference between the science and things considered supernatural is that one is something we have a solid understanding of and the other is speculation.
If there’s an unexplained phenomenon and we find a solid explanation for it, it becomes science. Weather and other natural phenomena used to be in the realm of the supernatural, same as dragon bones, mermaid bones and the kraken. Until we found out what they really were and how they worked.
If magic were to exist in reality, it wouldn’t be magic but instead just a branch of science.
A lot of things we can do nowadays would be called magic a few centuries ago. I mean, we can literally make frogs float in thin air. We can make incredible amounts of power from some magic rocks (nuclear power). We can even inscribe magic patterns into sand to make it think and talk (computers).
So coming back to the beginning: If we talk about something like a Simulation Hypothesis scenario (which is de facto identical to a scenario where God exists outside of our plane of existence, however that is defined), it’s totally in the realm of possibility of that scenario that the simulated could break out of the simulation.
Or in case of the Big Bang Theory, it would be theoretically possible to peek before the big bang.
I’m not saying that it is actually possible, but I’m saying that we can’t summarily dismiss the possibility.
But, here’s the kicker, if we don’t know anything about this other plane of existence, then how can we know that our universe couldn’t spontaneously arise from it without the intent of a creator? That’s the crux of the question: We have a mystery about the origin of our existence, and “solving” the mystery by saying, “God did it,” is just sweeping the mystery under the rug and pretending it’s not there. What OP was able to see at 7 or 8 years old was that the mystery was still there, but with an unexplained extra step added.
Christianity (and most religions) always has been a way for people to cope with their fears and guilt. ‘what happens after we die?’ -> ‘its heaven dont worry’. ‘Am I a bad person?’ -> ‘no Jesus died for you dont worry fam’
It sounds like we were similarly inquisitive children, perhaps to the point of making adults uncomfortable.
My European mother is the reason religion didn’t fuck me up worse than it did. I was also forced to go to church as a kid, but even within our own family there were differences in thought and opinion that still managed to exist in civil dinner table discourse. My mother seems to have gone through her own questioning process, it just didn’t take her to extreme atheism but rather she arrived at more of a mystical Abrahammic monotheism. When I was older, I fell into the trap of religion on my own (Evangelical Christianity) and it’s changed the course of my life significantly in both good and bad ways.
A decade to a decade and a half later I’m mostly over it. I’m comfortable with my current belief system and I live life openly and honestly with 95% of people I meet. If I had to describe myself I’d call myself a self-rolled Buddhist-Atheist.
I’m not envious of those Christians with enough of a conscience to realize what’s going, but who are reliant on “American Christians™” for their community, support, spirituality/philosophy/introspection. They have difficult and painful decisions ahead of them. You can only ignore your conscience for so long, but the first to defect will be shunned and hated and will likely lose their entire social circles. That happened to me. They will also be susceptible, as we all are, to similar tactics and abuses as those doled out by their former religion. You don’t leave and suddenly become a mastermind at spotting abuse of power and become immediately immune. If anyone reading this falls into that category, I would recommend finding a nice, non-religious hobby where you see people from different walks of life on a regular basis. Bicycling groups, social dances, gardening collectives, etc. People are pretty nice outside of the bubble. You’ll be okay.